19/07/2025
Article I: The Peer Gynt Paradox
The first moment of wakefulness is a fragile, almost holy state. It is the briefest instant in which you exist wholly outside the digital architecture of modern life, unburdened by messages, updates, or the slow, crawling terror of reality. And yet, before your consciousness fully assembles, the hand twitches. It knows where the phone is. It reaches, blindly, before the mind can intervene.
Do not let it.
Instead, allow yourself to experience morning. Not the cheap, digital facsimile of morning—the one filled with unread notifications and the sterile glow of a screen—but the real thing. Close your eyes and imagine it as Morning Mood, the opening to Peer Gynt. Those few swelling notes, the slow rise of the sun on an untouched world, the perfect illusion of hope before the inevitable arrival of disillusionment.
And the phone? The phone is Solveig's Song in reverse—it is the thing that promises to wait for you, but once you reach for it, the enchantment is broken. You open the lock screen, and in doing so, the great and terrible wheel begins to turn. The sacred moment vanishes into the ether. The emails arrive. The wars continue. The markets wobble. Someone, somewhere, has made a bold and terrible decision about urban planning.
You are no longer in the morning.
If you find yourself unable to sit with yourself in the quiet, if the silence feels unbearable, if the itch to check gnaws at you like a half-formed thought—then you must face the truth: you are no longer the master of your own attention. The world has already reached into you, has taken root inside your mind, and what you call your "self" is merely a thin layer wrapped around the endless hunger for distraction.
Perhaps you never truly wake at all. Maybe you merely rise, check, scroll, perform, and disappear.
But tomorrow, just once, delay it. Let the world wait. The illusion of hope is fleeting, but it is yours, if only for a moment.
Collected